He Stopped Telling Anybody In March

The porch faces east, which is why he is out on it at ten past six with the second cup, and why the light comes across the field in a way that makes the whole thing look like an advertisement for a life he is not having.

There is a man who walks a dog past the end of the drive at about twenty past. They have been saying good morning to each other for nine years.

Sixty-four. It has been going on for four of those years and getting worse for two.

In March, a woman at church asked him how he was, and he told her. Not dramatically. He gave about four sentences of it, plainly, because she had asked and because he trusted her.

And she was wonderful. That is the thing. She was wonderful for eleven days. There were texts and there was a casserole and there was a name of a man who does a thing with magnets, and there was an offer to come and pray about it with two others which he had to decline three times, and there was a follow up at the door about whether he had looked into the magnets.

By the end of the second week he understood that telling the truth had turned him into a project, and that the project would need managing, and that he did not have the strength to manage the people managing him.

So in April he went back to fine, thanks, and you.

He has said fine, thanks, and you approximately two hundred times since, and it works, and he is lonelier than he has ever been in his life.

If you went back to fine in your own April, you know that nobody in that story did a single thing wrong, and you know exactly why you have not told anybody since.

He said it before anybody told Him

The weight, first and at full size, because on this site nothing about God gets said until the true thing has been put down properly.

What this costs is not the trouble itself. It is the second thing, which nobody counts. It costs you the possibility of a true sentence in your own life. It costs you church, functionally, because a place where you cannot answer a question honestly becomes a place you attend rather than a place you are. It costs the woman who was wonderful, because you can no longer be near her without managing her. It costs four years of a man saying two words at a door. And it costs you the mathematics you did in April, which came out correct and which has left you alone on a porch at ten past six.

I am not calling that small and I am not measuring it against anybody else's, because nothing on this site ranks one person's load against another's. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter before it can be spoken is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the mornings have gone past lonely into thinking nobody would have much to manage if you were not on the porch at all, tell one living person today, and I know exactly what I am asking. Your doctor, the man with the dog, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that on his own, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who walk up a drive.

Now, Exodus. A nation in a situation nobody was fixing, and a sentence God says out loud with nobody present but a shepherd and a bush.

And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows.Exodus 3:7

Read the three verbs and read the order of them. Seen. Heard. Know.

The first two you would expect. God observes, God hears the noise a suffering people make, and a fair number of religious people would stop there and call it comfort.

But He adds a third one and the third one is different in kind. I know their sorrows. Not I am aware that they have some. The Hebrew there is the intimate verb, the one for knowledge that comes from the inside rather than from a report, and He uses it about the specific interior weight of specific people.

You are known from the inside by somebody who did not need a summary of it. Exodus 3:7 has God saying I know their sorrows out loud with no petition on the table, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that sentence off a mountain and puts it on a porch in the second cup.

Now notice when He says it. Nobody has asked Him. There is no scene in the previous chapter where Israel puts together a delegation and explains the situation clearly. There is groaning, and there is a God who has already got the whole of it, and who opens the conversation by telling one man what He already knows.

That matters to somebody who has stopped telling people. Because your silence has cost you a great deal, and there is exactly one place where it has cost you nothing at all.

You have never once been assessed on the basis of what you managed to say out loud. That is written into Exodus 3, and His Spirit is the one who searches a man's inside, so the four sentences you gave in March were never the file God was working from.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because you have had a year of good people saying warm things at a door.

It does not say the trouble is lifting. It makes no promise about your body or your circumstances or next spring, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and a man who talks confidently about somebody else's fourth year is talking about himself.

It does not tell you the woman was wrong either. She was not wrong to care and I am not going to prosecute her, and neither does the verse. This site does not put people on trial for loving somebody clumsily.

And it does not rank you. It does not say your affliction is lighter than Egypt's. It says known. Which is a statement about God's position, not a measurement of your load.

You were known exactly, at the size it actually is, and He was the first one who had it in full. Scripture says I know their sorrows, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who carries that from a burning bush to a wooden step.